LETTERS TO TRAVEL

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 16, 2005

Turtle Bay's lost gamble

A few points of interest about Turtle Bay Resort ("Turtle Bay's shell now worthy of site," Aug. 28, by Jeanne Cooper): Before it was a Hyatt or a Hilton, the hotel was built and developed (in 1970) by the Del Webb Corp. as the Kuilima Hotel and Country Club. As Cooper noted, it was expected to bring gambling to Oahu's North Shore. The first floor was built wide open, and somewhere beneath the floor are power outlets that would have fed the pits and slot machines.

Gambling was never legislated and Del Webb, which operated the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas and the Sahara Tahoe Hotel (now the Horizon) at Lake Tahoe, as well as nongambling properties, had a white elephant on its hands, isolated on the other side of the island from the airport and the action.

BOB BRACKETT

Napa

Timely Soweto

I greatly enjoyed finding Stephanie Hanes' article describing some of the places to visit in Soweto ("Soweto: South Africa's icon of apartheid opens its doors to visitors," Sept. 4).

My wife and I are beginning a five-week African trip in Cape Town Monday, including Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Johannesburg. Soweto is on our list of places to visit, so the article was most timely and helpful.

DON OBENDORF

Benicia

Continental Drifter

Great column by John Flinn ("Continental Drifter sells it all for a life on the road," Sept. 4) about people who don't travel but live in different places and move a lot.

I have met a lot of them, mostly Aussies, who travel for a year or so. I remember meeting Ol' Fritz in Central America. He had been on the road for two years or so, and I was on my first long trip, . We all huddled around to look at his passport, which had stamps from Asia, Eastern Africa and Eastern Bloc countries (this was in 1978). He was so cool.

Later, in Cuzco, I met an American and an Austrian with their 3-year-old daughter who was speaking English, German and Spanish. They said they had been traveling for 18 months in Central and South America, and she picked Spanish up playing with other kids.

You have a lot of readers who take more than a couple of weeks when they go. This column reflected the people I meet and run around with all the time.

BILL CARUSO

Modesto

"Because I spend much of my time in inexpensive countries (Venezuela, Indonesia, Thailand, etc.), I spend maybe $2,500 to $3,000 per month on average."

JOHN WALL

San Francisco

As an American and San Franciscan now living and teaching English in China, I greatly enjoyed Flinn's column on Elliot Hester, the "Continental Drifter." Good for him, doing what he's doing. Two years ago, I quit my job at Stanford, sold most of my things and headed to Asia. I have returned to visit America twice since then, but those were just stopovers. My journey will continue wherever it will take me. For now, that means teaching in China for a year.

While this life is not as completely nomadic as Hester's is, since it involves stopping in one place for a bit, it does share much of what he talked about: Having only what you can carry, not getting tired of living out of a duffle bag, feeling lighter and not missing what was left behind and accumulating stories along the way. I do, however, have to clean my apartment from time to time.

Thanks for a fun thing to read on the other side of the world.

PAUL SORENSEN

Huizhou City, Guangdong,

China

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